


Night

by Twyd



Category: Durarara!!
Genre: Bickering, Established Relationship, Fluff, Love, M/M, Moonlight, Romance, Slash, Slice of Life, Talking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-19 05:00:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14229822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twyd/pseuds/Twyd
Summary: “The opposite of love is not hate,” Izaya parries, somewhere between their orgasm and sleep, and Shizuo can’t remember what they were talking about. “It’s indifference.”Or, Shizuo and Izaya’s post-coital philosophising.





	Night

Shizuo is learning more and more about Izaya since going to bed with him. Izaya’s eyes, for example, are red-brown, neither one or the other. They are Merlot, a deep, rich wine. Izaya’s legs are at an 180 degree angle, something he performs with ease, one flat on the bed, one over Shizuo’s shoulder. The underside of his thigh is silky against Shizuo’s lips.

Izaya is slim, and the almost feminine clothing he likes shows off his body. Married men would blink and stare at him in confusion, often in their partner’s presence, and Izaya would smirk at them flirtatiously and disappear from their life for good. 

“The opposite of love is not hate,” Izaya parries afterwards, somewhere between their orgasm and sleep, and Shizuo can’t remember what they were talking about. “It’s indifference.”

“Says who?”

“Elie Wiesel.”

“Don’t know who that is.”

“You should,” Izaya admonishes, and proceeds to tell him. Remind him, rather. Shizuo is more forgetful than outright ignorant.

Izaya scoffs at this.

“It’s all the crap you eat, Shizu-chan.”

“Piss off, I’m not that much bigger than you.”

Shizuo tries not to compare himself to Izaya’s flawlessness, finds himself doing it at times anyway, especially now he’s seen him naked.

“Nonono, that’s not what I meant. Shizu-chan has a very nice body.” Izaya pats Shizuo’s bare stomach placatingly, which Shizuo has to fight not to suck in. “I meant the  _ quality _ of what you put in your body. Ice-cream and pudding. Not exactly brain food.”

“Milk’s healthy,” Shizuo says defensively. His considers sweets the weaker of his vices, compared to smoking, violence and the occasional binge drinking.

“Not with sugar, fat and hormones added.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

He still can’t remember what they’d been talking about, but it doesn’t matter.

They are in Izaya’s apartment, in bed, the room bathed in an ethereal light, one that prompts Shizuo to lift his head out of Izaya’s hair and look out the window.

“Hey, what’s with the moon?”

Izaya turns over on Shizuo’s chest to take a look.

“It’s an optical illusion,” he says after a moment. He proceeds to explain how the size of aerials and other parts of the city make the moon seem so huge, which Shizuo only partly understands. 

“Huh,” he says, when Izaya’s finished.

“You don’t believe me?”

“Oh, I believe you.” Shizuo wouldn’t admit it, but Izaya is the smartest person he knows, and he tends to believe him unless he has good reason not to.  “I just, haven’t seen this before.”

Izaya feels around for his phone and tries to take a photo.

“It won’t show up right. I need a proper camera,” he sighs.

“No you don’t,” Shizuo tells him. “You’ll remember it.”

They lie there enjoying the view.

“This is why you live on the top floor,” Izaya tells him contentedly.

“And leave your curtains open.”

“Yep.”

Izaya starts talking about the moon, how it changes tides and internal rhythms and moods, which Shizuo only half listens to, enjoying the sound of his voice more than its content, the relaxation in it, the lack of malice.

“Maybe that’s why you’re not annoying me so much.”

Izaya laughs.

It occurs to Shizuo, lying like this, that this could be what marriage is like. Lying in bed after sex, sated and talking about whatever fell out of their heads. This could be a house in the country, with kids asleep in the room next door.

Shizuo tries to line this up with the commercialised version of dating. A faceless woman holding his hand, a honeymoon somewhere they’d saved up for, Paris or Venice, walking through flowered trees, eating in expensive restaurants, taking 100 pictures a day. Then he stops himself from thinking of marriage with anyone.

The moon must be messing with him.

-

The moon is gone when Shizuo wakes up, daylight cruel in its place, and he has to utter his least favourite words.

“I have to get ready for work.”

As he gets dressed, Shizuo has to remind himself that he works with Tom now, that it’s better than barwork. He slips on his blue sunglasses. He had lived in these since they were gifted to him by his brother, considered them a part of him even more so than the suit. Shizuo does not only have supernormal strength but supernormal senses, and the sunglasses took away the burn and turned the world a soothing shade of blue. He likes to think this helps him keep calm. Well, sometimes.

He takes a final, reluctant look at Izaya and goes to work.

-

The plants in Izaya’s house always move. Or rather, Izaya always moves them or changes them in some way, but to Shizuo, an outsider, it is like they have taken on a life of their own when he is not there, a spider plant moving from one corner to another, a Yucca changing its position by the front door.

Shizuo doesn’t even know why Izaya has plants. They are not decorative, unflowery and plan.

But he sniffs one day out of curiosity and finds it scentless but emitting something else, something below the bar of regular human senses, something balmy and good. He vaguely remembers something about plants being good for the home that wasn’t just Feng Shui crap, about them bringing oxygen and life into a room. He should get one.

“Why do you keep moving them around?” he asks Izaya.

“To rotate the sunlight for them.”

The moon is back, though not full.

“Waxing gibbous,” Izaya tells him the name, which sounds like a character in a children’s book.

They are in bed. He wonders if Izaya liked the animal smell of his sweat, the way Shizuo liked his, or if he just found it repugnant. 

They talk about life, Ikebukuro, people they know, subjects they liked in school.

“Ones were you could be alone,” Izaya says. “Like Math. Not having to work with idiots like in Biology or Drama.”

“What about Shinra?”

“He’s the exception to the rule.”

Fair enough.

“What about jobs?” Shizuo says. He thinks about this a lot, tries to imagine enjoying what he did for a living. “What would you do?”

“What I’m doing now is fine,” Izaya says airily. “I have enough money, time, peace and dignity. I wouldn’t want any more. You see all these drunk salarymen in Shinjuku or downtown, they kill themselves at school and college just to kill themselves at their jobs all day, drink with their buddies all night, cheat on their wives when they miss the last train home.”

Shizuo stares upwards in the dark. It is just about the most personal thing Izaya has ever said to him.

-

“How can you not have a bath, Shizu-chan?”

They are at his place again. Izaya is being bratty but not outright mean. He turns on the water for his post-sex shower before Shizuo can respond. Not that he needs to. Izaya can see the apartment can clearly not fit a bath. 

Shizuo remembers the last rare time they had slept at his place.

Izaya, freelancer and probable crook, able to work as he likes (in Shizuo’s eyes, anyway) had stayed curled up in Shizuo’s bed as he got ready for work. Shizuo had looked at him uncertainly before leaving him there. They normally went to Izaya’s place, it being bigger and with moonviews, although that had only happened once. He touched Izaya, but the informant mumbled something and rolled over, away from his fingers. They hadn’t slept until 3am. Shizuo went to work and left him in peace.

He had come home to a tidied apartment,  fresh sheets on the bed, old ones in the laundry bag, bed made. Shizuo’s airing cupboard and laundry bag were not hard to find, but still, it was unnerving.

Izaya comes to bed now with still-damp hair, and Shizuo lets his thoughts starting falling out of his mouth.

“If you could go anywhere where would you go?”

“Norway,” he says, after a moment. “I like the folklore, the society, the remoteness. Why? Where would you go?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I ask. My last trip was to Osaka to see my cousins.”

“You should venture outside Ikebukuro now and then,” he laughs. “There’s stuff closeby. Tokyo Tower. Harajuku. All those shrines.”

“I’m scared of losing my temper somewhere important.”

He had never admitted this to anyone. It is the reason why he will always complain about Ikebukuro but not budge an inch.

“Well,” Izaya says, and not in the mocking tone Shizuo had expected. “I think it’s time to face that fear, don’t you?”

“...maybe I will. Want to come?”

To his surprise, Izaya agrees.

-

They meet at Ikebukuro station at an ungodly hour, but the sky on the walk there had snapped Shizuo out of his sleep-deprived grump. 

Izaya buys them a pack of animal crackers to share, which they announce to each other before eating, scanning the departure board above their heads.

“Lion,” Shizuo says, popping it into his mouth, as Izaya feels around in the bag in Shizuo’s hand without taking his eyes off the screen. “Where are we going?”

“Sheep. Just pick somewhere, anywhere.”

“Monkey. I can’t just pick anywhere, Izaya-kun. We have to look at the fare and the time it’ll take.”

“Another lion. I can cover it if somewhere really calls to you. Overnight stay as well. Slow down, Shizu-chan. You didn’t say what animal that one was.”

“Sorry. I think it was a parrot. I’m thinking.”

“There are no parrot animal crackers.”

“How do you know? You got a book on animal crackers too?”

“Pick a train, Shizu-chan,” Izaya tells him, giving him a shove, almost sending the rest of their animal kingdom scattering. 

Shizuo scans the board thoughtfully.

“Elephant.”

“What?”

“The cracker.”

“Oh.”

He picks a train. It has a destination he has never heard of. 

Izaya cheats and Googles it between animal crackers (“to make sure it’s pretty”), and they buy their tickets, find the platform and climb on board. 

Izaya swipes the bag off him as they take their seats, complaining that Shizuo keeps getting ‘the good ones.’

“It’s like we’re runaways,” he says, a few minute to departure. “No-one will know who we are.”

“Yeah. I better not lose my temper,” Shizuo sighs. “Strangers won’t make allowances for me.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Izaya says, frowning. 

Shizuo wonders if he’d been thinking of handholding, of public embracing. The closest they’d come to this had been one night drinking when, on the way home, Izaya had tripped over nothing and fallen flat on his face, and Shizuo kept his arm around Izaya’s waist the rest of the way home, being too drunk and the world too dark for him to care.

The final few families and couples, not as many as there would be later in the day, mill around them now, finding seats, as the train pulls away for wherever it is they’re going. Shizuo  has a feeling it will be better than Paris.


End file.
